What Matters?

A Letter to My Students About the Importance of Reading...

Not everything you read will stay with you for the rest of your life. You won't remember all the small details from every novel you have read, or all of the specifics from each nonfiction writing you have read. You won't remember everything you read on each web page you have visited, and you won't remember the headlines from each newspaper or magazine you have read.

As you read, your brain remembers what it thinks it will need to know for the future. Your brain will remember those facts and stories that you can make a connection to your own life. Your brain will remember those facts that you want to remember or that you found more interesting than the rest.

As you are writing about your reading for the week (in your AR blog/journals), I want to know what you have been reading this week? It might be a variety of things. But more importantly, I want to know what you think about your reading. I want to know the details that you really remember. What really matters to me...

• that you enjoy the book, article, web page, blog entry, or novel
• that you gain some new insight by reading (big thing or a small thing)
  
• that it is not torture to read and that is a nice break in the day to let the rest of the world drain away from you and a few minutes alone with your own thoughts
  

What really matters in what you read?Here are some example questions you might want to answer in your blog/journal. You don't have to answer them all, this is just a list of suggested questions when you get stuck. What I really want to know about might include...

• As you read what are you thinking about?
  
• What connections to your own life can you make?
  
• Does this reading remind you of something that has happened to you?
• Do you want to do something new because of what you have read?
• Have you changed an opinion about a topic?
• What will you remember from this reading in 5 years?
• Does this reading (the characters or their actions) remind you of a specific person?
• Did you learn something you never knew before?
• Were you shocked or appalled by something you read?
• Were you extremely happy about something?
• Can you relate to a character - tell me how?
• Did you come up against the train wreck syndrome ... so bad you just can't look away?
• What do you like about the writer's style?
• Is this book like any another book? movie or a song?
• Does this book refer to pop culture? history, movies, literature, other books, science...

Be thinking about, "Why should Mrs. Badgley care care to read my blog entry?" What do you have to say that is important enough for Mrs. Badgley to read it?

(Also, tell me the title, author, how long you have been reading it...)

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